Dorothy Howell Rodham

Dorothy Emma Howell Rodham (June 4, 1919 – November 1, 2011) was an American homemaker and the mother of former first lady, U.S. senator, United States secretary of state, and 2016 Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Dorothy Howell was born in Chicago, the elder of two daughters of Edwin John Howell, Jr., a Chicago firefighter, and Della Murray. She had a younger sister, Isabelle (born 1924). Her ancestry consisted of Welsh, English, Scottish, French, and distant Dutch heritage; her paternal grandfather was an immigrant from Bedminster, Bristol in England, and many of her recent forebears had lived in Canada.

Her childhood has been described as Dickensian. The family lived as boarders in a crowded house. The parents were dysfunctional and unhappy and sometimes prone to violent fights; they moved Dorothy around various schools, and paid only occasional attention to the children, before divorcing in 1927.

The children were then sent on a train by themselves, unsupervised (Dorothy was eight years old, Isabelle only three), to live with their paternal grandparents in the Los Angeles suburb of Alhambra, California. The sisters endured harsh and unloving treatment from their grandparents. The grandmother favored black Victorian dress and punished the girls for trifling acts. After Dorothy was caught trick-or-treating one Halloween, an activity the grandparents forbade, she was confined to her room for an entire year except for attending school, and reportedly not even allowed to eat in the kitchen or play in the yard.

Dorothy left home at the young age of fourteen in the depths of the Great Depression, working as a housekeeper, cook, and nanny for a San Gabriel, California family, being paid $3 a week. Encouraged by her employer to read and go to school, Dorothy attended Alhambra High School, where she joined several clubs and benefited from two teachers.

After graduating from Alhambra in 1937, she moved to Chicago for a failed reunion with her mother, who by then had married Max Rosenberg. Subsequently, she moved into her own apartment there and took office jobs to support herself. She later said, "I'd hoped so hard that my mother would love me that I had to take the chance and find out. When she didn't, I had nowhere else to go." Hillary Rodham Clinton later attributed her interest in children's welfare to her mother's life as well as her belief that caring adults outside of family can fill a child's emotional voids.

While applying for a job as a clerk typist at a textile company, she met a traveling salesman named Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, eight years her senior, in 1937. After a lengthy courtship, they married in early 1942.

Their first child and only daughter, Hillary, was born on October 26, 1947. (In 1995, Hillary Clinton said her mother had named her after Sir Edmund Hillary, co-first mountaineer to scale Mount Everest, and that was the reason for the less-common "two L's" spelling of her name. However, the Everest climb did not take place until 1953, more than five years after she was born. In October 2006, a Clinton spokeswoman said she was not named after the mountain climber. Instead, this account of her name's origin "was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add.")